One of the most notorious crimes of the Internet Age took place in Waukesha, Wis., on May 31, 2014, when two 12-year-old girls stabbed a third girl 19 times, in order to appease a fictional ghoul they had become obsessed with online. As the victim recovered in a hospital and the assailants awaited trial, the media went viral with what was soon fearsomely misconstrued as the "Slenderman killings." But in the wildly unsettling Slenderman, Kathleen Hale, who originally covered the case for Vice, finds more to fear in a criminal justice system that is eager to try children in adult court, with adult sentences and a cavalier attitude toward evidence of mental illness and juvenile brain development.
The Slenderman case can seem impenetrably bizarre, but Hale nimbly documents the numerous contributing factors to the online legends, childhood-onset schizophrenia, the crime and its judicial outcome. Never one to accept villainous characterizations at face value, Hale (Kathleen Hale Is a Crazy Stalker) painstakingly peels back the sensationalized layers of the case. What she uncovers is a powerful rigidity in thinking about crime and punishment, especially in regards to the "superpredator." A phenomenon grown out of the 1990s, it became "the grown-up's version of Slenderman: a terrifying evil that did not actually exist."
Slenderman is careful not to minimize the seriousness of the crime in question: two girls nearly killed another. Instead, Hale builds a poignant rebuttal to one lawyer's repeated assertion that "there is only one victim in this case." Hale's capacity for empathy may be disagreeable to some, but her steady narrative vision brings clarity to a thoroughly upsetting situation. --Dave Wheeler, associate editor, Shelf Awareness